A mixed bag in the early going gave way to minor gains, with the S&P 500′s tiny advance enough to put it further into uncharted territory after Tuesday’s settlement at a record-high close.. The index is now up 0.98 point at 1,886.50.

The Dow industrials are flitting between small gains and losses, currently up 7.58 points at 16,540.19.

The Nasdaq Composite is demonstrating a less tentative tone, rising 14.10 points, or 0.3%, to 4,282.14 to 4,285.26.

Call them activist investors or corporate raiders, Carl Icahn and other troublemaking billionaires aren’t going anywhere. We take a close look at the burgeoning war chests and track record for a class of investor that has made big inroads since the heyday of leveraged buyouts, even winning over some of the nation’s biggest pension funds and other institutional investors.

Google
/quotes/zigman/93888/delayed/quotes/nls/googGOOGinvestors will see the amount of shares they own double as the company enacts a 2-for-1 split designed to ensure founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin remain in control of the search and tech powerhouse.

MarketWatch’s Ben Pimentel has all the gory details: Shareholders of record as of March 27 will get two shares for every one they owned. One set of shares, called Class A, will trade under a new ticker symbol, GOOGL, while the other, Class C, will retain the historic GOOG ticker symbol. The shares are expected to start trading on Thursday.

Shares of MannKind are the top trending ticker on StockTwits, which is no surprise given its 72% surge. The biopharmaceutical company late Tuesday said its diabetes treatment Afrezza was recommended for approval by a Food and Drug Administration advisory committee. The agency has until April 15 to make a decision.

The shares haven’t been for the faint of heart, having plunged sharply earlier this week. Wednesday’s rebound leaves shares up 46% for the week to date.

“Today’s ADP numbers should be taken not in isolation but as a part March data package – together with the ISM and jobless claims figures, they indicate a nice progression growing at moderate rate,” said Jim Russell, senior equity strategist at U.S. Bank Wealth Management.

It appears that cold winter weather and not something fundamental held back the growth and resulted in weakness.

Looking ahead, markets want a steady pace of jobs growth, not too cold and not too hot. A big jump, such as north of 275,000 jobs, might force the Fed to speed up tapering and at that point ‘good news’ might become ‘bad news’.

“Low-flation,” particularly in the euro area, is an emerging risk to advanced economies, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde said Wednesday. “A potentially prolonged period of low inflation can suppress demand and output-and suppress growth and jobs,” she said at the School of Advanced International Studies as she called for more monetary easing by the European Central Bank and continued action by the Bank of Japan.

St. Louis Fed President James Bullard said in an interview Wednesday that he expects the first rate hike to come in the first quarter of 2015, though he concedes that he’s ahead of most of his colleagues. In an interview on Bloomberg Radio, he says a faster rate of U.S. economic growth as well as Europe out of recession should lift inflation closer to its 2% target. He noted that the jobless rate has come down quicker than many on the FOMC had anticipated

Stocks are running into stiff headwinds after a two days of sizeable gains. Periods of “hesitation” are not surprising, says chairman Jim Awad at Plimsoll Mark Capital. But he says the path of least resistance remains higher.

Google/quotes/zigman/93888/delayed/quotes/nls/googGOOG, which until now has played a relatively minor role in the fight between the two tech giants, is likely to feature more prominently with Samsung charging Apple of using Samsung as a proxy to get to Google. Samsung phones operate on Google’s Android platform.

Shares of Apple and Google were both up fractionally while Samsung shares rose 1.3% in the Korea stock exchange overnight.

Treasury yields are up Wednesday, on track for their fourth consecutive day of rises as the 10-year note yield jumps 4.5 basis points to 2.80%. The rise in yields and corresponding drop in prices reverses the predominant direction of the last three months, when benchmark 10-year notes had their best quarter since 2012. Read more in the bond report.

While we are talking about last quarter, high-grade companies sold the second most amount of debt on record in the first three months of the year. Much of that was a rush to take advantage of borrowing costs that are still historically low, but companies are also seeing increased incentives to enact pro-shareholder plans, which are often financed with debt. Read more about it here.

The first rate hike is not likely to be warranted until at least the last half of next year, Atlanta Fed President Dennis Lockhart said Wednesday. He bases that assessment on sustained GDP growth in the neighborhood of 3%, and said if that progress doesn’t materialize, then a later liftoff date would be appropriate. Like Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen, Lockhart talks of a “dashboard” of economic indicators including the jobless rate, marginally attached workers, those working part-time but wanting full-time employment , labor market turnover and wages. He wants to see both a drop in the headline and the so-called underemployment, or U6 gauge, as well as a tightening of the gap between them. Lockhart will become a voting Federal Open Market Committee member in 2015.

The first three months of 2014 were the busiest first quarter for U.S. initial public offerings since 2000, the height of a similar boom during the dot-com era, according to a report released this week.

In fact, for U.S. IPOs, as the Prince song goes, it feels like a time to party like it’s 1999 again.

It is Amazon’s first hardware product since it rolled out the Kindle Fire tablet three years ago, reports MarketWatch’s Ben Pimentel.

Forrester analyst Jim Nail says that based on an examination of the device itself, Amazon Fire TV “is kind of a run-of-the-mill, undifferentiated offering compared to those other guys,” according to Ben’s blog post.

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